Tours available from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday

ERIN MCCRACKEN / COURIER &amp; PRESS
John Neal spreads out water around a giant LEGO LST ship built by Brickmania, a Minneapolis Minn., company that sells custom LEGO sets, as they set up the 24-foot long diorama at EMTRAC, the Evansville Museum Transportation Center, on Tuesday afternoon. The display which is a depiction of the Battle of Peleliu will be on display for one day, from 11 a.m. to 8 a.m. today.

For the first time since the winding down of World War II, an LST was built Tuesday on Evansville's Riverfront.

Large doors swung open on the bow of the landing ship, tank, exposing a cavernous cargo hold that spanned the length of its hull. Armed with machine guns, filled with tanks and manned by a full crew, it was almost identical to its World War II-era counterpart, LST-325, anchored nearby at Marina Pointe.

One small difference: It is built entirely of LEGOs — crew and all.

Custom LEGO company Brickmania of Minneapolis, Minn., assembled the 10-foot long LST model at the Evansville Museum Transportation Center on Riverside Drive Downtown. Volunteers from the LST-325 Memorial, who know the real warship, will give tours of the model from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday at EMTRAC.

More than 1,000 of the 300-foot-long ships served during World War II in the Pacific and European theaters. Although LST-325 was built in Pennsylvania, 167 were built and launched from an Evansville shipyard.

On Tuesday, the new ship was deployed to the Pacific theater to fight in a diorama depiction of the Battle of Peleliu, also entirely made of LEGOs.

Farther up the beach, LEGO-Japanese soldiers wielded tiny replicas of World War II-era weapons and stood in plastic bunkers. The 24-foot long diorama depicted a familiar scene for LSTs in World War II. Amphibious landings were the defining tactic of America's island-hopping strategy.

More than half a million bricks comprise the diorama, which cost about $33,000, Brickmania designer Dan Siskind said. All the pieces fit into plastic totes and weighh more than 300 pounds. Several totes were filled only with the tiny, blue LEGOs poured in a pile around the model LST to resemble the ocean.